15–19 Jun 2026
Europe/Rome timezone

Modeling populations in the gravitational-wave mass distribution

16 Jun 2026, 11:00
12m
talk Div3 OSB

Speaker

Stefano Torniamenti (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

Description

Over the past decade, gravitational waves have emerged as the primary means for detecting stellar-mass black holes (BHs), unveiling an unprecedented view of their population. These BHs encode key signatures of their progenitor stars, and provide unique probes of stellar and star cluster formation across cosmic time.

In this talk, I explore BH and gravitational-wave populations in star clusters across galactic environments, from disks and halos to galactic nuclei. I introduce inSpyral, a new population-synthesis framework that self-consistently combines star cluster formation in cosmological models with their long-term dynamical evolution, bridging scales from BH cores to galaxy-scale orbits.

I investigate the origin of gravitational-wave events from different formation channels, namely binary evolution and dynamical interactions, and characterize how they evolve with redshift. Also, I show how the BH mass, spin and eccentricity distribution provide crucial insights into the birth properties of star clusters across cosmic time. These results offer a coherent framework to interpret current gravitational-wave observations and make reliable predictions for Einstein Telescope.

Author

Stefano Torniamenti (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

Presentation materials

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